Cecily Brown

Rehearsal

Press Release

Rehearsal

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal was on view at MCA Santa Barbara from January 28 - June 3, 2018 and was on view at The Drawing Center October 6 - December 18, 2016.

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition dedicated to her drawings. Arranged thematically, the more than eighty small drawings, large-scale works, and sketchbooks on view will foreground Brown’s iterative reworking of motifs from her wide-reaching arsenal of source material—prints by eighteenth-century draftsman William Hogarth, pages from animal clip-art books, and the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 album Electric Ladyland are just some of the images that Brown has rendered again and again in her own hand. These drawings are not studies for her paintings but rather a distinct form of aesthetic inquiry, one that isolates the investigatory impulse that grounds Brown’s art in general.

Where Brown’s canvases revel in the visceral immediacy of paint, her drawings offer fragmentary motifs that build upon and undo each other. Their logic productively relates to the concept of ‘rehearsal’—a term derived from the Old French rehercier that originally meant to go over something again with the aim of more fully understanding it. The notion that this repetitive action was geared toward a culminating performance was a later conceit that has obscured the original definition of the word as valuing inquiry in its own right.

Indeed, what we witness in Brown’s sketches is the artist’s desire to visualize and respond to the images that attract and confound her (Brown has said that learning to draw is teaching yourself how to see). Painstaking and obsessive in their efforts to work and rework either an entire scene or the slightest of gestures—a turn of a lion’s head here, the arch of a boy’s torso there—Brown’s drawings take the act of looking as their very subject.

Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator

PRESSThe New York Times review > click here"The final result of all this repetition — and I assume this has been as true for Ms. Brown when she made the drawings as it was for me as I viewed them — is that everything else falls away, even the object being looked at or the figure being drawn, and the activity of drawing itself is revealed in all its strange particularity."

The New Yorker review > click here"The London-born, New York-based painter’s bright and turbulent works on paper, installed on petal-pink walls, might be the season’s sexiest show. "

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal is made possible by support from the James Family Foundation, Nancy and Fred Poses, Jane and Ned Sadaka, and Marlies Verhoeven.